Bad actors have treated equality as a zero sum game, with women falsely portrayed as ‘winning’. Feeling they have to compete, young men are lashing out
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ast week, results from a global survey signalled a rise in worrying attitudes towards women among young men. A team from the pollsters Ipsos and King’s College London found that nearly a third (31%) of gen Z men believe that a woman should always obey her husband, a fifth (21%) believe that she should never initiate sex, and 33% believe that women should let their husbands have the final word on important decisions.
There’s a limit to how much can be drawn from a worldwide survey that draws averages from vastly different cultures and economies. We cannot ask respondents what they meant by their answers, nor how they reconcile apparently contradictory views: younger men are more likely than older generations to call themselves feminists and to find successful women attractive, yet some also say women should be subordinate. Nor does the data tell us whether the same men hold these views.
Other surveys show a more complex picture, where young men’s desires don’t necessarily align with traditional gender roles. One survey of young Americans found more men than women expressing a desire to be parents; another found adolescents of both sexes looking for more vulnerable depictions of fathers on screen.
